Enter Larry Ellison, who co-founded database software company Oracle in the late 1970s, and is also an eccentric rich tech entrepreneur. In 2011, Oracle announced it would acquire Pillar Data Systems, a data storage company majority owned by Ellison. Oracle paid no money upfront. Rather it paid later based on Pillar Data Systems meeting certain financial targets.

Musk said he recused himself from the potential Tesla-SolarCity acquisition offer, which is valued at $2.5 billion to $3 billion. He wants to avoid any appearance that he was using Tesla to enrich himself through the sale of his SolarCity shares in any deal.

Like Musk’s recusal, Oracle said at the time that its decision to acquire Pillar Data Systems was made by an independent board committee and that Ellison was uninvolved. Still, it’s hard to keep from imagining Ellison and Musk sending themselves acquisition proposals and then giggling

Here are some honorable mentions when it comes to companies buying or investing in other businesses that have close links:

Apple’s acquisition of NeXT in 1997 for $429 million in cash, plus 1.5 million Apple shares for Steve Jobs, who co-founded both companies. NeXT was Jobs’ second act after he was ousted from Apple in 1985, and the acquisition marked his return to his first company.

Salesforce’s recent acquisition of MetaMind, a startup financed in part by Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s co-founder and CEO. Salesforce spent $32.8 million on the acquisition, according to regulatory filings.

Google and its VC arm’s investment in 23andMe, the genetic testing startup co-founded by the then-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Naturally, Brin recused himself from the decision to invest in the company.

Watch Steve Jobs Launch His Biggest Product Failure

Until the video below was discovered by researchers working on Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs, the only known recording of Jobs from his NeXT years was a PBS documentary called The Entrepreneurs that included footage from a 1985 offsite meeting shot shortly after Jobs was pushed out of Apple.

The new video—re-created out of a pair of VHS tapes only their owner knew existed—has none of the documentary’s production values. It’s too long (2.5 hours), too raw, and way too dark. But it will be treasured by computer historians for what it is: The only record, outside of contemporaneous journalists’ reports, of the gala unveiling of the NeXT computer in 1988.

What struck me, watching the two videos back to back, is how clear it should have been that the machine was doomed.

In the 1985 offsite, Jobs—always aware of the camera—is seen at a whiteboard trying to set the new company’s priorities: Was it more important to create a machine with great technology, meet a $3,000 price point, or have it ready by 1987?

Had NeXT met even two of those goals, it might have been a hit. But it wasn’t ready for limited release until 1989 and it started at $6,500—not including a $2,000 printer and a $2,000 external hard drive.

Former Fortune editor Brent Schlender, who attended the black-tie gala at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, called the NeXT “dazzling” and “relatively inexpensive” in a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal. He revisited the experience nearly three decades later in Becoming Steve Jobs (2015), co-written by Rick Tetzeli, whose chapter on NeXT is the best account in print of what Jobs did wrong and what he learned from his mistakes.

“The truth that all of us missed was that this was a machine that had virtually no chance to succeed in the market,” Schlender writes. “The principles on which NeXT had been based were in tatters, the goals if those long-gone offsite meeting trashed…

“The game was already over, but few of us knew it.”

Only some 50,000 NeXT computers were built before Jobs abandoned his beloved magnesium cube and concentrated on selling NeXT’s innovative software.

But the computer did manage to make a dent in the universe, most famously when Tim Berners-Lee used one to design the World Wide Web. The games Doom, Doom II, and Quake were also designed on NeXT machines. Some of its code probably still lives on today. Jobs sold NeXT’s operating system to Apple in the 1996 deal that brought him back to the company, and NeXT’s object-oriented software technology became the foundation on which OS X was built.

Here’s the new video, posted two weeks ago on YouTube:

Tom Frikker, the Tufts University freshman who restored the 28-year-old video for public release, described the process in an e-mail to Fortune:

“The stage lighting at the event was not optimal; all of the highlights and shadows were blown out. A timecode had been superimposed over the whole video. Worst of all, the tapes had been recorded over a speedboat video, with some parts missing and others repeated. After deleting the ‘garbage’ and removing duplicate sections with help from the timecode, I spliced the two tapes together and worked on color correction, lessing the over-saturated effect present in the stage scenes. Part way through the presentation, Steve showed the audience a video called ‘The Machine to build the Machines’, a short documentary on NeXT’s revolutionary factory. This video was missing from the tape, but I was able to locate a version and splice it in. Finally, all of the audio was cleaned, with most of the ever-present VHS hum reduced.”

Watch this 2:20-minute scene from the new ‘Steve Jobs’

On the eve of its opening in New York and Los Angeles, Universal Pictures has released two more videos, one that you’ve got to see.

It’s the 2:20-minute scene in the second act where Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) tells Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) that his NeXT workstation will be the single biggest failure in the history of personal computing.

One caution: We all know that Apple didn’t steal the Mac’s graphical user interface from Xerox PARC. It’s one of many places where Aaron Sorkin’s script departs from reality for dramatic effect. Try not to let that spoil the movie for you.

Steve Jobs opens wide on Oct. 23.

Meanwhile, the analysts’ estimates for Apple’s fiscal Q4 have started to roll in. We’ll get to them soon enough.

From consulting to consoling

Ask Corey Gordon how old he is and he couldn’t tell you, because he has no birth certificate. His childhood was fragmented, just as his memories of it are.

He says he vaguely remembers an older woman taking care of him in his infancy, but she wasn’t his mother. He remembers being cold and walking barefoot on ice. He remembers going hungry, and being so malnourished that when he coughed, he had to pull worms out of his mouth.

The abandoned child of a Korean woman and an American soldier who met during the Korean War, Gordon was, like so many children of such unions, ostracized. His mother abandoned him, and he might have been forced to survive on the streets had he not been delivered to an orphanage, where he experienced his first shower, food security and kids his own age to play with. He recalls the day an orphanage staffer told him he’d been adopted by a family in Minnesota. “It was a dream come true. All I wanted to be was to be American,” Gordon says.

Adjusting to the dream, and his new surroundings, would be tough for Gordon. “On my first day of school I ran away because I thought I was being given away. My parents had to come with me to school for several weeks so I could realize that I could come home every day,” Gordon recalls.

Over time Gordon settled into life in Minnesota, went on to college Northwestern College in Minnesota, started a family of his own and began a successful career in marketing, mostly for finance and banking companies. In 2003, looking to cut down on travel, he took a job with Americana Capital Corporation, a bank holding company, which owned Americana National Bank, a small asset bank in southern Minnesota. Gordon was hired to help grow the two national subsidiaries ACC had.

It seemed to be the perfect fit, but six to nine months into the job began to hear rumblings of issues the CEO was having with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The issues were concerning to other holdings the CEO had and his alleged use of the bank for his own personal purposes. In the end the CEO was removed from the company was and barred from banking. Gordon was not involved with the management of the bank and was implicated nor charged of any wrongdoing in the matter.

Gordon, who was 36 at the time, was too young to retire from professional life, but the problems at American Capital rattled him. He realized he was seeking more meaning and fulfillment from his work. He began consulting to nonprofit organizations, providing guidance on marketing and fundraising. In 2012 Gordon started his own consulting firm aimed at helping nonprofits, Nonprofit Strategies, and found his services in great demand. But there was one nonprofit that he found himself going the extra mile for: Feed the Children, one of the largest charities in the world.

“I knew some of the guys, so I flew down and met with the executive team and took them on as clients. And before I knew it I was working 50 hours a week, almost double the budgeted 29 hours. I talked with Kevin (Hagan, President and CEO of Feed the Children) and he was like, ‘Why don’t you just join us?’”

So he did. Gordon put his consulting business on hold on Oct. 1, 2012, and became the chief marketing and communications officer of Oklahoma City-based Feed the Children, a faith-based organization that provides food and other poverty relief in the U.S.

Last summer, Feed the Children had the opportunity to open an office in South Korea and Gordon was selected to lead the trip. The office will direct all support and fundraising programs in the country which will most likely include an orphanage, among other things. Gordon expressed some initial hesitation about returning to his native country, but in the end he agreed. The trip was followed last by a trip in December to North Korea on the invitation of Dr. James [Kim, president of Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. (Dr. Kim, featured in Fortune in 2009, also left a life in business to pursue a broader calling, bringing Western-style education to North Korea.)

In Pyongyang, Gordon visited five orphanages to see firsthand the university’s strategies to combat hunger in the poverty-stricken country. Feed the Children is going to begin providing support to the orphanages in the near future. For Gordon, now 47, the visits were at once heart wrenching but also inspiring. “For me, as a former orphan, to go visit those orphanages? Sometimes life can seem like a meandering journey,” he says. After many so twists and turns, Gordon now seems to have found a clear path.

Words of Wisdom

Advice for retirees considering a move from corporate life to giving back “First, do it. You won’t regret it. Second, start by identifying the cause that you’re the most passionate about. There are many good organizations, but given the reality, there will be challenges with all of them. Having the bedrock of a cause you’re willing to invest your life in will keep you energized.”

What he wishes he knew before the switch “I was far too naïve coming into the not-for-profit sector. The nonprofit space is indeed about charity, altruism, passion and doing good, but it’s still human beings managing the organizations and running the programs. I was surprised at how badly nonprofits often treat each other, viewing each other as competitors, when if you look at their vision/mission statements, ostensibly they should be collaborating. If people can check their egos and logos at the door, there’s a tremendous opportunity for real positive change.”

Biggest challenge “Culture shock. These are broad-brush statements, but generally speaking, in the for-profit realm, change can be constant, with market forces and consumers driving new strategies, technologies and products/services. Change is anathema to nonprofits. For-profits play to win, with a focus on risk management. Nonprofits play not to lose, with a focus on risk avoidance. For-profits embrace innovation and R&D, looking for exponential gains. Nonprofits feel hamstrung by the insane fixation on arbitrary overhead ratios, thereby avoiding innovation and R&D, finding safety in incremental gains.”

Biggest reward “Purpose. I look back on my life and see how all of my personal and professional experiences have woven together for a work that takes me far beyond myself. To know that every day I get to wake up and positively impact the lives of children here in the U.S. and around the world that brings a wonderful sense of purpose and meaning for what I do each and every day.”

Next is a series of articles that looks at executives’ efforts to use their talents and skills to enrich or support the lives of others and upon retirement from professional life.

Apple’s Next Move Misses the Mark

Let’s get this straight right away: Apple Computer did the wrong thing. On December 20, Apple announced that it would spend $400 million to purchase Steve Jobs’s company, NextSoftware. The company said it would adopt Next‘s NextStep operating system for future versions of the Macintosh computer. Most of the commentary I’ve seen about this decision is off the mark, especially the talk about Jobs coming back to save Apple. That is sheer nonsense. He won’t be anywhere near the company. People seem to have a real desire, perhaps even a need, to make excuses for Apple. Everybody wants to find a way to justify what Apple did.

You can’t justify it. Apple did precisely the wrong thing. Now the only future for the company is to get smaller and smaller until there’s nothing left. In fact, the only sensible conversation to have about Apple is the one in which you argue about how long it will take to die. (Before I go on, you should know that my venture capital partnership, New Enterprise Associates, has a big stake in Be, a computer company that Apple recently considered buying. Instead, Apple bought Next. NEA would have made many millions of dollars if Apple had purchased Be. Jilted by Apple, Be is now considered a company with a less-than-certain future. NEA owned nothing of Next.)

Here are the two basic reasons why buying Next is the wrong move for Apple:

(1) For years, pundits have sat around and talked about why Apple needs a new operating system. Next‘s technology won’t solve that problem.

The existing Macintosh system software does have some serious flaws. It doesn’t manage memory very well, so programs tend to bang into one another easily. The Macintosh operating system also makes connecting to the Internet a confusing process for nontechies–at exactly the time when what those users want most is to connect to the Internet.

The NextStep operating system does these things pretty well, in large part because it is built on top of Unix, the preferred operating system of engineers. But if Apple really wants to use Unix as the basis of the future Macintosh operating system, it could work with the version of Unix it licensed years ago for far, far less than $400 million. Most engineers would agree that the version of Unix that Next uses is generally better at managing high-performance applications–but it is still Unix.

Next reportedly brings in annual revenues of over $50 million, mostly from corporate clients attracted by a few things that NextStep does really well. But these are not capabilities that make a big difference to Apple‘s customers. Apple sells to a totally different market segment–end users, in schools, businesses, and homes. It is very, very difficult to see how Applewill translate the value of Next‘s software into something meaningful to its own customers.

(2) Anybody who knows Apple Computer knows that the company bought the wrong part of Next.

Next has two parts: the mess of software the company has licensed or developed since it was founded in 1985, and Steve Jobs. Apple has purchased the former. According to the corporate spin, Apple will combine its Next mess with its old mess of Macintosh software and turn the combination into a new, irresistible operating system (code-named “Rhapsody”) that will be found in products far more compelling than any existing Macintosh. And Apple will accomplish this feat in a timely fashion, which would be a good thing given that Microsoft,Apple‘s nemesis, delivers a new version of its Windows operating system every 30 months or so.

Unfortunately, Apple does not need more software. It already has lots and lots of software, and most knowledgeable people in computing will tell you that the less software you have, the better. What’s more, Apple has done an abysmal job at managing the stuff it already has, as evidenced by its inability to deliver Copland, which was for years supposed to be thenext version of the Mac operating system. Copland, say Apple, has now been supplanted by Rhapsody.

So Apple doesn’t need more software. What Apple needs is a visionary who understands how to make really great software and who can provide the leadership to make that happen.

The best candidate might have been Steve Jobs, since he was the guy who browbeat the original Mac team into doing something truly important and historic back in 1984. But Jobs has spent most of the time since December 20 making it clear that he will not actually do anything for Apple once Apple‘s purchase of Next is complete. In other words, he’s going to take his money and run. (There is something really cynical and possibly even disturbing about the founder of a company getting his revenge by taking advantage of the company when it is most vulnerable. Jobs must know how bad a decision Apple has made by buying Next–but he seems desperate to be released from his own bad decisions.)

Apple did get Avie Tevanian, a very smart guy with a long track record designing operating systems. Tevanian is now the engineer in charge of Apple‘s operating-system design. ButApple needs someone at the top, at least on the executive committee if not in the CEO’s job. Tevanian is two levels away from the CEO.

So the question remains: What should Apple have done? The essential problem that Apple has never been able to solve is how to transform promise into reality. It never needed more rocket science. What it needed were the basic skills of running a business–like, say, making a decision to do something, and then actually getting everybody in the company to work toward that goal. Instead, Apple developed a culture in which doing what is good for the customer, or for the company, is viewed as boring and irrelevant. That’s how it has trained its customers to never believe anything Apple says.

John Sculley has admitted repeatedly that his biggest mistake as CEO was his inability to control Apple‘s engineers. In fact, no Apple CEO has come close to doing that. This failure has nothing to do with the decisions that get all the press, such as whether to license the operating system or which microprocessor to use in the Mac. It results from not knowing how to run a business for the benefit of customers and shareholders.

Personally, I had high hopes for the last CEO, Michael Spindler. He was nicknamed “The Diesel” for being a tough, no-nonsense manager when he was running Apple Europe. But not only did he fail to control the engineers, he failed at everything else as well. I also had high hopes for the current CEO, Gil Amelio, who took over Apple nearly a year ago after turning around National Semiconductor with a commonsense approach.

There are signs that Amelio has begun to change Apple‘s underlying culture by placing a premium on performance. But executives still talk about how impossible it is to predict what will happen at Apple–and about how hard it is to get employees to go along with the program. And now Amelio has gone and bought Next.

Clearly, there is no one in the executive suite who knows how to translate a mess of software into something that will appeal to all those reasonably intelligent people who still want to buy from Apple. The Be operating system, BeOS, is designed expressly for desktop-computer users–in other words, for Apple customers. But, according to some news reports, part of the reason Apple resisted paying $200 million to acquire Be was that Amelio and his team were offended by Be CEO Jean-Louis Gassee, who asked for control over the development of Apple‘s system software. Isn’t it ironic that even Apple‘s newest leader resisted the very thing that Apple needs most: a visionary with total control over technology development, someone who could direct Apple to a product it could sell to more people, not fewer?

You can take my pitch on Be and Gassee for what it’s worth. But here’s the bottom line on Apple. Apple has no visionary. Apple has two big messes of software rather than one. And I cannot see, for the life of me, what the Macintosh user gets out of the deal: Based on Apple‘s track record, would you wait two years to find out whether Apple can turn the Nexintosh into something compelling?

It takes a long time to kill an $11-billion-a-year company. Apple‘s already down to around $8 billion a year. I give it another three years, until the millennium, to fall the rest of the way to the ground.

This piece originally appeared in the February 3, 1997 issue of Fortune.